We've spent a quarter-century undoing the smart, simple tax reforms of 1986. Here's to hoping Washington can act like its old self before it's too late.

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Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the last major overhaul of the federal tax code. Signed into law by Republican President Ronald Reagan and championed by Democrats such as Bill Bradley and Richard Gephardt, the enactment of the law was a remarkable bipartisan achievement. It dramatically lowered marginal rates with a top rate of 28 percent, removed millions of working poor off the tax rolls, and simplified the tax code by closing a myriad of tax loopholes.

Unfortunately, many of the loopholes that the 1986 reform eliminated have returned, with a few extra ones slipped in for added measure. Since the law's enactment, more than 15,000 changes have been made resulting in a tax code that is several volumes longer than The Bible and requires 71,684 pages to spell out the rules. Because of this complexity, 80 percent of American households use a tax preparer or tax software to help them prepare and file their taxes.

But complexity is only part of the problem. The other is cost. Year-after-year, elected officials in Washington shovel more tax breaks into the trough (tax breaks now account for $1.1 trillion) causing both deficits and marginal tax rates to be higher than is necessary or optimal for the economy.

They're wrong. Delaying tax reform will only make implementing the solution harder and more painful. There has never been a better time in which to enact tax reform. The Super Committee was created as part of last summer's debt ceiling agreement to require Congress to vote up or down, without amendment, on tax reform as part of its plan to address the federal government's medium and long-term fiscal imbalance. This BRAC-like power is designed to limit the influence of special interests whose work in the past has littered the tax code with loopholes. This opportunity is not likely recur anytime soon. It is, therefore, in the Super Committee's interest to act now rather than wait.

Tax policy is complicated. But lawmakers on the Super Committee don't have to start from scratch. There are already a number of plans that would dramatically lower marginal rates for individuals and businesses, eliminate tax expenditures, and grow revenues for deficit reduction. For example, the Zero Plan put forward by the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission (what some refer to as 1986-style tax reform on steroids), would lower marginal rates and simplify the tax code from six to three tax rates, tax capital gains and dividends as ordinary income, eliminate the burdensome Alternative Minimum Tax, align the corporate and the top individual rate, move our corporate tax code to a territorial system, and eliminate all or most of the $1.1 trillion in tax expenditures.

Furthermore, the Super Committee does not to choose between writing a full tax reform bill in two months or agreeing to an open ended process for tax reform in the future. The Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission, Gang of Six, and others have proposed setting up a procedure for expedited consideration of tax reform that sets out parameters and criteria for what tax reform must include in addition to the revenue target while leaving details to the Senate Finance and House Ways & Means committees. Such an approach ensures true tax reform will be voted on while leaving the details to those who have the expertise to get the job done.

In addition, fundamental reform, which broadens the base by reducing deductions, credits, exemptions, and other tax expenditures; simplifies the code; and lowers individual and corporate tax rates, has the potential to substantially improve economic growth. The Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that income tax reform that wipes out most tax expenditures in order to lower marginal rates, could increase the size of the economy by 1.2 to 1.9 percent of GDP over the medium-term, and even more over the long-term.

Finally, the new revenues generated by fundamental tax reform would help the Select Committee to achieve substantial deficit reduction. The Super Committee is charged to identify $1.5 trillion over ten years in deficit reduction, though $1.2 trillion over ten years would be enough to avoid an automatic sequester. While this would represent significant savings, members should be shooting t at least double, or triple this target in order to put the debt on a sustainable course. Relative to a realistic budget baseline, it would take about $3 trillion in deficit reduction just to reduce the debt to below 70 percent of GDP by 2021 and put it on a modestly downward path. Identifying an amount of deficit reduction significant enough to put the debt on a downward path will almost certainly require looking beyond discretionary spending to major entitlements, other mandatory programs, and ways to produce more revenue.

No doubt taking up tax reform will be a difficult challenge for the Super Committee. But the benefits of enacting fundamental reform are worthy of the effort. Besides, enacting tax reform is a whole lot better for the economy, and for politicians of both parties, than continuing the on-going fight over extending the Bush and Obama tax cuts for another year.

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.